I'm in Orlando the next few days presenting at the spring ASP.NET Connections / DevConnections conference. There are about ~1500 people attending this week's conference, which is a great turnout for the spring show (the fall show is in Las Vegas each year in November, and had almost 5,000 people last year).

The OpenAjax alliance is a group of vendors, open source projects and companies using AJAX that are focused on developing common AJAX standards and ensuring interoperability across different AJAX frameworks, tools and technologies. Joining the group will help ensure that the Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions integrate well with other AJAX frameworks and server technologies.

Last week I started the first in a series of blog posts I'll be making that cover some of the new VB and C# language features that are coming as part of the Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release later this year.

Last week we shipped the March CTP of our Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release. It is available as a free download by anyone, and can be downloaded as as both a VPC (allowing you to run it in a virtual machine) as well as a standalone setup install (note: if you are running Vista you want to make sure you only use the VPC version). You can download it here.

Occasionally I get to do cool non-traditional things as part of my job. Two weeks ago, I was the guest star in a fun "Red vs. Blue" Halo video produced by Rooster Teeth. You can watch it online here (it is 3 minutes in length).

One of the questions I am often asked is "How can I integrate ASP.NET security with Classic ASP other non-ASP.NET URLs?". Specifically, people want to know if they can integrate ASP.NET's Forms Authentication, Role Based Security, and URL Authorization features with Classic ASP, PHP, JSP, .HTM, .JPG and other non-ASP.NET URLs.